Perpetual Entertainment invited me over to their downtown San Francisco studios yesterday for a little hands-on time with their upcoming massively multiplayer online game God and Heroes Rome Rising.

Chris McKibbin, Perpetual's Co-Chairman & President, said the game is set to hit by the end of this summer and went to great pains to explain how it would be more of an action adventure game than your typical massively multiplayer online game. Some of the other things he highlighted, which he believes sets his game apart from the rash of other MMOs, were the game's classic, mythologicially-influenced theme, a strategic squad-based combat system and collectible minions that level up with you. Think of them as a sorta Pokemon, it sounds like you will be spending a lot of time in the game running around trying to find and collect these guys and then trading them with other real-world players.

Kinda a neat concept.

The game also has this robust god system which seemed a little too familiar to me. It's not much different than the overarching thing in other games that make your particular character special, be in that you're a rookie who shows much potential, a hero or happen to be the son or daughter of a god.

I had a chance to play around with the most recent version of the game for about 20 minutes before I had to run to another appointment.

The character creation was fairly basic, though there were enough sliders in the appearance field to allow you to somewhat tweak the look of your particular son or daughter of a god. You also have to select your class and your god.

I started out in the game with a level two character and ran through a quick mission that seemed to exist in a smallish incident in the game. The other press testing out the game were also here, but my feeling was that it was a small space that could only handle a dozen or so players at a time.

The look of the game, while a bit generic, did have quite a bit of polished ambience, from the classic look of the structures, to far off fights with large creatures.

I particularly liked the character animation for fights. Instead of your typical sword swing, my character seemed to really get into the fight. The two special attacks I had were also quite original looking. One had my character leap up in the air, spin and deliver a downward blow with his sword as he landed. The other involved both sword stabs and punches and actually knocked the enemy to the ground temporarily.

While the animation had a nice flare, it was still the same point and click MMO fighting wrapped up in a nice package.

After taking out a few bad guys, delivering some goods, destroying some statutes, killing more stuff, I found my way back to my original quest giver and was told to make my way down into a pit to kill some guards in hopes of finding a key to escape my location.

The fights with the squat guards showed off some of the nice non-player character animations, including one attack in which the thing knocked me to the ground and jumped up and down on my fallen character for a few seconds: A nice touch.

After killing off a few guards I found the key, made my way through a gate and into another instance, one that the developers said would eventually support perhaps a few hundred real players at a time.

In this instance, a small village on the shore of a lake, I received my first minion, a choice between a fighter, essentially, and a healer.

Once you receive a minion you're given the ability to assign them to squads and a separate interface pops up which allows you to control their actions or put them in particular modes, like support.

This is where, I think, the game has the most potential. The idea of controlling a small army of your own minions in real time, setting them out across a field to attack another player's army of minions, could really change the way you play an MMO.

And it doesn't hurt that one of the guys behind the whole minion system is Stieg Hedlund, the lead designer of Diablo II.

Hedlund said that the idea behind minions is that they are suppose to maximize your character class, not the other way around. They want to make sure that you don't try to create characters that are essential minion masters, he said.

There are 132 minions in the world and their abilities and uniqueness are directly connected to how hard they are to find and get under contact.

Another thing that I think could really give this game legs are some of the expansions that they're already talking about doing. They include introducing new cultures and mythologies to the game, which would add to the number of gods and of course inherent conflict.

Also, they plan to add nation versus nation battles to the game down the line and player versus player is where MMOs can really shine, I think. Brian Crecente